Yesterday Politics Home published an article by tobacco control campaigner Lord Faulkner.
It was headlined Smoke out tobacco companies influence and argued that:
“Smokers’ rights groups” and retailer front groups will continue to claim they have a right to be heard. Perhaps so, but they should no longer have the right to hide from Parliament the payments and briefings they receive from tobacco corporations.
Today Angela Harbutt, who is now working for Forest (see previous post), responded with Tobacco Control – the real smokescreen:
If there is a need for transparency – it is a need for government to come clean on just how much public money is being spent on Tobacco Control and just how far the tentacles of Tobacco Control have reached into government health policy. It might not be a bad idea to also get a truly independent body to evaluate how effectively this money has been spent. In August 2010 Eric Pickles MP announced that the government was going to stop "government lobbying government". This must surely apply to Tobacco Control.
Curiously, Politics Home have allowed Lord Faulkner to add this comment to Angela's article:
For Angela Harbutt to compare "Big Tobacco" to organisations devoted to improving public health is laughable, but hardly surprising from someone who admits to being funded by Forest, an organisation set up by the Tobacco Manufacturers Association to promote the interests of the tobacco industry.
I have now written to Politics Home as follows:
I would be grateful if you could remove the totally false allegation by Lord Faulkner that Forest was "set up by the Tobacco Manufacturers Association to promote the interests of the tobacco industry".
If you allow the comment to remain, perhaps you could ask Lord Faulkner to produce evidence to support the claim. For the record, the TMA didn't even exist when Forest was founded by Sir Christopher Foxley-Norris, a pipesmoker and former Battle of Britain fighter pilot, in 1979. The tobacco trade association at the time was called the Tobacco Advisory Council but there is no evidence the Forest was set up by the TAC or anyone else connected to the tobacco industry.
I'm afraid this sort of misinformation is typical of the anti-smoking industry and it supports Angela's argument that one of the problems facing Britain today is not Big Tobacco but Tobacco Control.
Watch this space.